tiny house decision

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as i wrote up the thing debating whether i should continue, i went to bed thinking, “man i really should just– build it” and when I woke up and everyone had said “build it” that pretty much solidified it. So. Thanks everyone for the feedback, I think y’all are right– there’s no certainty that prices will come back down, there’s no good reason not to do it if in any way I can. so i’m gonna.

So– now I have to start spending money. Ha.

progress report on the foundation:

The foundation is nearly done. I hauled like 800 pounds of rocks for it last time I was here, picked out of the flower garden– I started by picking up the little piles that had been picked into the aisles between beds– and then this visit I’ve hauled about 500 pounds of rocks out of the high-tunnel (greenhouse thing), at VegMan’s request– he’d raked them into the aisles in there and then the apprentices had made a rule that every time they walk out of that place they have to carry some rocks out, so they had a pile down at one end. I picked the aisles for one whole load– two full milk crates, a full 5-gal bucket, and a full 3-gal pail– and then came back and collected that pile of rocks into two milk crates, then picked three 3-gallon pail loads into the drywall bucket and the tops of the milk crates, then one final 3-gallon pail load. Hauled that over, dumped it into the foundation site. Then I picked more rocks out of the soil we excavated from the site– the lower parts of what we dug out were also mostly gravel, and now that’s been rinsed by the rain, so I pulled out all the stones, three or four milk crates of those, and pitched the bigger stones one at a time by hand because the pile’s right there, and then picked a 3gal pail worth of smaller gravel off the far side of the pile and carried it over.

If you add up what I’ve picked, I’ve moved just a little under a ton of rocks into that pile.

The tractor has moved probably ten tons of gravel, and will get a couple more today, is the plan.

I’m also going to try to plant my flax today, which is great and all except I don’t remember where I put the flaxseed I had saved from mice attacking it in the granary and brought inside to the guest room and now it’s not there so clearly my sister tidied it…. to where….. ??? I found one tiny seed packet of it which is not what I want At All so like. Who knows.

And VegMan said he’d make the bed for it, but I don’t know if he finished that yet. BIL and I have to set and level the concrete blocks for the foundation but we don’t have the concrete blocks yet but he has to get the gravel finished first and the site he’d been excavating it from ran dry so he has to find another vein of it up on the chunk of the farm called the “gravel bank” which is called that for obvious reasons.

Anyway I had applied for, and have now had approved, a credit card just for this– the idea being, I could get one with points to earn cash back on all this dough I gotta spend, and also then every little House expense goes on it and then we pay it off but we have a perfect accounting of everything directly House-related so we know what the project cost.

My secret, that I haven’t explained to most of my RL people, is that I want to have room in this tiny house to set up both my spinning wheel, which is shoved in a corner of my living room and not very accessible, and the floor loom my mother owns that she never used and I want to figure out how to set up and attempt to use. Part of my idea with the design is that I can have the loft for my messy personal business, and then the lower floor is reasonably presentable so I can work and have people come in and work there as well. So, we’ll see how that goes, LOL.

Ugh I’m so relieved just to have made the decision. Now I have a quote for $5k worth of lumber and $1k of roofing, which does not cover quite half of the projected expense of the project and doesn’t include any of the finished kiln-dried stuff for the framing, any of the windows and doors, or any of the insulation. Woo! (Your picture was not posted)

nim-lock: Elihal is a QUEEN and they’re BEAUTIFUL

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nim-lock https://nim-lock.tumblr.com/post/184577599639/elihal-is-a-queen-and-theyre-beautiful-and-i-love :

Elihal is a QUEEN and they’re BEAUTIFUL and I love them

It’s interesting following someone else’s process (Kevin Wada’s Nightwing vid), because you realize what they pay attention to that you normally don’t (his extra hair strands? mindblowing). I also relate to the feeling of being trapped in my own style sometimes, so it’s been a fun break trying other peoples’ methods! (Your picture was not posted)

one ton

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Making that post also motivated me– the math is very rough so I have no idea if it’s correct or not, but I have been moving rocks by hand, picking them out of the production field (from which they do very much need the rocks removed) just across the farm road from the house site into buckets and pails and milk crates that I load into a garden cart, and I’m going off a very rough estimate that a 5-gallon drywall bucket full to about the top with rocks weighs maybe 70 or 80 pounds. I have no idea if this is correct, that was my sister’s estimate. It’s a weight that i can lift, and can carry, and can carry quite a distance, but cannot lift very high and cannot walk very well with, and am extremely tired after shifting.

So anyway. Let’s go with 70 pounds. A milk crate weighs a similar amount full of rocks, just from how much difficulty I have shifting it. Two milk crates, a 5-gal bucket, and a 3-gal pail in a garden cart is a load of 270 pounds.

[image description: The interior of a garden cart, with a drywall bucket, two milk crates, and a metal pail full of irregular river stones and gravel of varying sizes.] By that math, given the full and partial trips I’ve done, I’ve– ah, I thought this morning’s load would get me over a ton, but by my revised math (I’d been estimating 80) I’m only at about 1,780 pounds of rocks moved by hand. So, I need to do one more trip this morning to make it to one ton. Which I was planning to do anyway, so.

Fuck, if only I was building this cabin out of rocks. But that’s a skillset I super don’t have.

Maybe I’ll get bearselkie buff from this. I hurt all over so far, though.

No pain, no gain, right? (Your picture was not posted)

laurelnose:was asked to do a Keira for @bomberqueen1

like the brushstrokes

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laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/650626910238474240:

[image: a digital painting of Keira in green and red, holding a steaming mug. Her eyes are closed and she is breathing in the steam.]

was asked to do a Keira for bomberqueen17 https://tmblr.co/mEi4sKUjTkzs4ila4vEdnuA so: apple Keira 💚❤️

one half an experiment with CLIP’s vector tools, one half an experiment with CLIP’s gouache brushes. slowly and with somewhat poor grace attempting to move away from Photoshop (Your picture was not posted)

ow

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I’m somewhat surprised at how many people, on this post and on earlier discussions of this, have expressed surprise that I can lift 70 pounds. I am a fairly large person and have been pretty active for a lot of my life, having livestock and active hobbies and the like, but it’s a fair handful of years since i did any working out. But I feel like a lot of things are sold in 50 pound sacks on the expectation that a normal adult human can shift 50 pounds fairly easily, and 70 pounds– well, I remember that concrete mix comes in 70-lb bags and I remember being about 14 and having to lift those for some project Dad was working on, and I could get it to my waist but no higher. So these buckets felt about like that, which was annoying because I had to get them slightly above my waist to put them into the garden cart from the back.

I do wish I had better grip strength, I need to work on that.

But the thing that’s brutal about shifting the rocks and gravel really isn’t lifting the buckets. Like, that’s quite heavy, I can’t carry it very far, but I don’t have to. What’s got me suffering and what sucked at the time is that to pick the rocks, out of the ground, I had to either squat down, kneel down, or bend double, and mostly what I wind up doing is bending double, and that’s a shitton of strain on my lower back, abs, and all of the various muscles of my ass and thighs, as well as my neck. So every single muscle in my butt is really mad at me at the moment, and my thighs are considering secession.

It’s the same as any stoop-work, and that’s the other thing I did today, which I don’t know if I mentioned– I sowed a bed of flaxseed, with unicornduke https://tmblr.co/mVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ, which was fun but was also a lot of bending.

So anyway. My ass is really mad at me.

I did do one more load– so I’ve made it officially to one ton of rocks shifted on my own. (The tractor did probably 15-20 tons, so like. LOLsob. whatever man.)

<3 to everyone who’s had commentary and advice on the tiny house thing, btw– I’d respond to more comments but Tumblr doesn’t always let me tag people so I feel like I’m yelling into the void. This blue hellsite! (Your picture was not posted)